Polar codes have gained significant amount of attention during the past fewyears and have been selected as a coding scheme for the next generation ofmobile broadband standard. Among decoding schemes, successive-cancellation list(SCL) decoding provides a reasonable trade-off between the error-correctionperformance and hardware implementation complexity when used to decode polarcodes, at the cost of limited throughput. The simplified SCL (SSCL) and itsextension SSCL-SPC increase the speed of decoding by removing redundantcalculations when encountering particular information and frozen bit patterns(rate one and single parity check codes), while keeping the error-correctionperformance unaltered. In this paper, we improve SSCL and SSCL-SPC by provingthat the list size imposes a specific number of bit estimations required todecode rate one and single parity check codes. Thus, the number of estimationscan be limited while guaranteeing exactly the same error-correction performanceas if all bits of the code were estimated. We call the new decoding algorithmsFast-SSCL and Fast-SSCL-SPC. Moreover, we show that the number of bitestimations in a practical application can be tuned to achieve desirable speed,while keeping the error-correction performance almost unchanged. Hardwarearchitectures implementing both algorithms are then described and implemented:it is shown that our design can achieve 1.86 Gb/s throughput, higher than thebest state-of-the-art decoders.
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